How I do what I do

Much of my cookery is "spoonful of this, pinch of that" sort of stuff. I find that, with a few very simple ingredients, I can make a number of different meals taste really good. Some of the essentials:
- a jar of minced ginger (cheap at the Asian or Indian grocery)
- a jar of minced or crushed garlic
- Tamari soy sauce
- lemon juice
- lime juice
- orange juice
- sea salt (the gray stuff at the co-op is fabulous)
- thyme (dry or fresh; dry's easier, but they make a paste in a tube now, of all things!)
- olive oil

Seriously, a combination of most of the above, with your choice of one of the citrus juices, makes a very basic but very tasty "sauce" for cooking vegetables. Some favorite combinations:

- Zucchini and mushrooms, with chopped tomatoes thrown in at the very end (and sometimes a can of chick peas). The tomatoes can be fresh or canned--canned ones are best if you can't get garden-fresh ones. The tastless, grainy, painfully acidic things that pass for modern tomatoes in grocery stores are NOT worth your time. Cherry or grape tomatoes, however, are the exception. You toss them in at the end of cooking so that they don't get too mushy; you want them hot, slightly seared, with the skin wrinkling just slightly.

- green beans (or other fresh beans, including the yellow wax beans and dragon beans), chopped into 2-inch segments, with sliced almonds

- snow peas, broccoli, carrots, and cashews.

We generally serve the vegetables over rice; our preference is basmati rice, but jasmine rice is also wonderfully aromatic and delicious. I love it when the basmati fragrance fills our home. It's doubly good when I've put a pinch of cardamom powder in the rice cooker.